jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services (SPServices) v0.5.7 Released

Tonight I’ve released SPServices v0.5.7. I can’t believe that I released v0.5.6 all the way back in June. It’s not that I’ve lost interest in SPServices, quite the contrary. Even more people have been using it (over 3800 downloads), and as I’ve said before, I know that its in use in some of the largest companies in the world. It’s very gratifying. The flip side of that is that lots more people ping me with questions and support needs. I try to get back to everyone as fast as I can and it take a lot of time. Thank goodness for my pal Mike Greene (@webdes03), who helps out when he can in the Discussions!

Well, enough about all of that. What’s in this release, you ask? Well, nothing earth shattering, frankly. It’s for a large part a maintenance release, though there are a few new goodies for you.

There’s one new function available. The $().SPServices.SPListNameFromUrl function is one which I built a long time ago to use internally to the library, but based on some questions from a few people over the last few months, I decided to promote it to a full-fledged function. It simply lets you get the list name based on the URL of the current page. I’ve used it inside many of the other functions since almost the beginning of the library. It parses apart the current URL, calls the GetListCollection operation of the Lists Web Service, and matches the URL base to get the list’s name. It would seem unneccessary, but I’ve found it to be a highly reliable and useful function to use in working with list forms.

By request, I’ve added four new operations to the library from the SiteData and Users and Groups Web Services. This is the first operation I’ve built into SPServices from SiteData, as I’ve always felt that the SiteData operations were a bit redundant and dated compared to the newer Web Services. However, back in July alexuni asked me to add EnumerateFolder, and there didn’t seem to be any analogous functionality already in the library. So voila. It’s been there in the alphas, but sorry it’s taken me to long to really release it, alexuni.  I had requests from a couple of other people to wrap the three new operations from Users and Groups: AddUserToGroup, AddUserToRole, and RemoveUserFromGroup. These three operations ought to make it easier to manage what users are in groups outside using the normal SharePoint UI to do it in Site Settings.

Finally, efficiencies and bug fixes. The bugs were all pretty much edge conditions, but still important to fix.  There were also some things I spotted in my earlier code where there were multiple Web Services calls being made where just one would do.  If you upgrade to this version, you should see some small performance improvements, depending on which functions you are using.  See the items in the Issue Tracker (listed below) if you’d like details.

Happy scripting!

As always, here’s a copy of the release notes from the Codeplex site.